THEATER CHRONICLE
313
in a few words and I don't think there is any brief and comprehensive
way to account for audiences. They come to improve their hours, to be
in the swim, to embrace a cultural occasion, to show their clothes and
see the clothes of other people, to furnish their minds, to receive moral
instruction. And, it is one of my favorite theories, to test their powers
of resistance to emotion. My mother used to go to the theater or to the
pictures in order to have a good cry, but we appear to have changed all
that and somehow prefer a test of our powers to demonstrations of our
weaknesses. My observations possibly mislead me, but everywhere I see
people testing to find whether they can eat without tasting, view without
suffering, make love without feeling and exist between winning and los–
ing in an even state of potentiality. Theaters are very good testing
stations.
The first play I saw this season was
Take a Giant Step,
whose hero,
a young Negro on the threshold of manhood, is assisted through the por–
tal
by an older woman. Everyone understands his sexual initiation is
necessary and all, except his mother, are helpful and sympathetic. The
theme of tender help extended by an older woman to a distressed boy
is highly popular on Broadway this season.
Tea and Sympathy,
which I
have not seen, celebrates the same form of loving-kindness. The satis–
faction derived by the audience from
Take a Giant Step
is undoubtedly
a moral one; tolerance, enlightenment, sympathy for the adolescent in
his first sexual crisis, broad-mindedness, considerations of social welfare
and of hygiene--on these the appeal of the play rested.
Calder Willingham's
End as a Man,
adapted by the author from
his amusing novel, fascinated me in the early part of the first act by
its sophisticated violence. The fits of rage into which the terrible Jocko
de Paris fell were truly impressive. But they degenerated soon into
merely childish tantrums, straining the ingenuity of Ben Gazzara who
was offered no hints by the author as to how to vary them. Jocko
promises at first to develop into a sort of military-academy Stavrogin,
but he ends as a super Katzenjammer kid.
I come now to a play which almost sent me back to the conversa–
tion of my French friend, T. S. Eliot's
The Confidential Clerk.
It cost
the playgoer six bucks to see this one. Of course it is not Mr. Eliot's
fault that unscrupulous Broadway people produce his plays, but I did
expect to learn, at this price, what ways lie open to a man who has
emerged from the dark night of the soul. I was sorely disappointed.
The Confidential Clerk
is Mr. Eliot's version of
The Importance of
Being Earnest,
the element of farce removed, replaced with something
more intellectual. Not a tear. It remains a comedy. Yet there is very
